Wireless

Yesterday Apple CEO Tim Cook showed a chart of how the iPad alone is selling more unites than PCs from any other individual vendor. This is an amazing achievement when you consider the iPad is a few years old and that HP swallowed up Compaq making it the largest vendor in the PC market. Of course with so much device proliferation the question of mobile device management or MDM has to rear its head. As this market is so crucial I am happy I had a chance to sit with Alan Dabbiere the charismatic Chairman of MDM leader Airwatch at MWC 2012.

One of the most important companies in the wireless space you may never have heard of is Aricent Group, the product engineering, carrier services and design company which renamed itself last year by combining Aricent and frog (formerly Frog Design). The name change was not done for cosmetic reasons, Aricent Group’s customers are carriers, and equipment providers who live in a brave new world requiring ever-faster time to market. In addition, in an increasingly standardized world of LTE, companies have to be able to provide bullet-proof interoperability and product and service stability while simultaneously adding value in order to reduce the brutal effects of commoditization which plagues virtually all markets where standards take hold. So faster product integration is necessary to keep up with evolving and hypercompetitive markets.

A great step forward for enabling security and management of devices in the brave new world of consumerized IT

Virtualization has certainly been a hot space over the last few years in-part due to the increased reliance on cloud-computing as well as the need to make data centers more energy efficient. Of course there is also cost savings associated with virtualization – allowing companies to squeeze out maximum performance from each server.

And mobile devices these days are as powerful as servers of less than a decade ago so it is natural to assume that there may be reasons to predict virtualization in the mobile world will become standard.

Yesterday I outlined 7 Wireless Data Cap Losers and today I thought I would explore the flipside – in other words, who might win as a result of carriers becoming far stingier with their bandwidth allotments. After all, devices are becoming far more powerful and quad-core tablets and smartphones could become the norm by the middle of next year if not sooner. So with all this power and limited supply of bandwidth, how might user behavior change?

We are in uncharted territory when it comes to mobility as this year we will see a slew of productivity-boosting 4G, quad-core smartphones like the Ascend 4D Quad from Huawei which I saw at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. Moreover, while devices get more powerful, we will only want to do more with them and quite often this means relying on wireless networks from carriers.

The only problem is these providers are rapidly running out of bandwidth and this means they have decided the best course of action is to cap users and slow their connections once they hit a certain threshold. Their other strategy is to just charge for bandwidth being used.

I've got lots on my plate this week before I take off to Barcelona to attend Mobile World Congress (MWC) - which was once called 3GSM. I've got great meetings lined up and I am very interested in seeing what is happening in the world of 4G, white spaces, M2M, tablets and smartphones. Apple won't be there - formerly anyway so I consider this event to be kind of like the anti-Apple confab. Interestingly, all the major events I attend these days are devoid of the iconic Cupertino brand as well.

It is clear that the Blackberry Playbook OS 2.0 upgrade which includes a first-ever email client needed to be perfect. After all, we have been waiting for this major release since May of last year. Sadly, it isn’t all it should be. It is however much better… The integrated email client is a great improvement over web-based email solutions users were once forced to use.

Metaswitch is relatively new to the SBC game but they already have been thinking of ways of taking session border controllers and making them more flexible and scalable. To that end the company has put its Perimeta SBC in the cloud allowing it to run on COTS servers with a variety of hypervisors.

According to Steve Gleave, VP of Marketing at Metaswitch, "The arguments for separating signaling and media functions in a session border controller are now well understood. The commercial benefits of running session border control on COTS platforms are also clear. So moving the signaling control function into the cloud, and leveraging the economies of generic server platforms and inherent system redundancy is a logical progression.

Would you move because you wanted a better cable company? The answer is probably not – especially if you live in an area of the country where you are served by a major provider. Cablevision is a relatively smaller cable company serving areas in the northeast like Connecticut and New York and even so they have WiFi-enabled much of their footprint allowing free wireless broadband to customers at many restaurants and shopping centers.

So cable companies aren’t necessarily competing against each other – they are competing against OTT providers, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube as well as phone companies.

Although reports have been swirling regarding Chinese hackers breaking into Nortel's computers for over ten years in order to steal trade secrets, I have been unable to confirm such a breach took place. I have tapped into a few high-level sources and they were unaware of anything like this happening - the internal Nortel employees would almost certainly need to know if such an attack was taking place.

After all, reports say that even Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski had a computer which was compromised.

One of the reasons Nortel went bankrupt had to do with Chinese competitors Huawei and ZTE undercutting Nortel on price for carrier wireless and other products. So it easy to understand why many would easily believe that Nortel had been hacked.

And hacks from China are not unusual - they have happened to numerous US companies and even government agencies.

But again, would you not let your company workers know if this was the case?

Siobhan Gorman has a story in the Wall Street Journal on what happened at Nortel and it seems there is enough information to make you believe the hack was real. But still, I remain skeptical that the breach if it happened was on such a massive scale.